MARTIN McGUINNESS, the Sinn Fein MP, is facing allegations that he ran IRA operations in the late 1980s despite stating under oath that he had left the terrorist organisation more than a decade earlier.

He has been accused in a new book by a former IRA colleague of ordering a wave of attacks that culminated in the killing of eight terrorists by the SAS during a failed attempt to storm a police station in 1987.

In a separate development, police are planning to interview him about an IRA inquiry that he conducted into the murder of a hostage in 1990.

The disclosures cast doubt on McGuinness’s statement under oath in November 2003, at the tribunal investigating the Bloody Sunday killings of 1972, that: “I left the IRA in the early part of the 1970s.”

They also put pressure on McGuinness to come clean about his IRA past in the run-up to Northern Ireland elections on March 7. He hopes to be deputy first minister, but he must first satisfy the Democratic Unionist party of Ian Paisley, the likely first minister, of his support for the police.

However, in an interview with a Spanish academic, Brendan Hughes, a former senior Provo, describes attending an IRA meeting with McGuinness in Co Donegal in the Irish Republic in 1986. Hughes claims McGuinness authorised a “major push” by the IRA that culminated in the death of eight members and a civilian at Loughgall, Co Armagh, in 1987.

Hughes told Rogelio Alonso, a politics lecturer at King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, that McGuinness believed the attacks would protect himself and Gerry Adams, now Sinn Fein president, against internal criticism as they tried to change the party’s rules.

The interview is included in Alonso’s book The IRA and Armed Struggle, which has recently been translated into English.

Hughes says in the book that at the meeting in Donegal, he argued that the IRA “wasn’t ready for the major push” and needed “another year of training”. He says that despite his recommendations McGuinness authorised a plan to overrun army bases and police stations in South Armagh and East Tyrone.

The security forces got wind of the plot and on May 8, 1987, 24 SAS soldiers shot dead eight IRA members and a passing civilian. The men, led by Paddy Kelly, were trying to overrun the Loughgall Royal Ulster Constabulary station.

Last night Kelly’s sister Mairead said: “I find this account disturbing. I would like to speak to Brendan Hughes and Martin McGuinness about it. This is not what I have been told previously.”

She had been told the IRA leadership had advised her brother that it was dangerous to carry out any more attacks.

Kelly said the police would shortly reopen an investigation into the Loughgall shootings and that she had had a number of meetings with them about their plans.

When it was pointed out to Hughes last week that McGuinness had sworn that he left the IRA in the 1970s, he stood by his account.

“He will have to answer that question himself,” said Hughes. “When people get caught up in lies, they have to continue with the lies.”

The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s major inquiries team is now preparing to question McGuinness about a separate killing: the murder of Eoin Morley, a former IRA member shot dead on April 15, 1990, after being taken captive by the IRA.

After the murder, McGuinness is said to have organised an IRA court of inquiry following a complaint from Morley’s mother Ailish about the shooting. The police plan to interview McGuinness about the inquiry and any other knowledge he had of the killing.

McGuinness declined to answer the allegations this weekend. However, he said: “Over recent weeks Sinn Fein have made enormous efforts to achieve the new beginning to policing promised in the Good Friday agreement and to see political institutions put back in place. Obviously, there are those who are opposed to these efforts.”

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